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Friday, March 6, 2015

Will You Need a New License to Operate a Self-Driving Car?

As reported by IEEE Spectrum: How do you train a driver not to drive? That’s a question officials
in California are wrestling with. The U.S. state furthest along the road
to self-driving vehicles is drawing up regulations for the operation of
autonomous vehicles by the general public—and it may require motorists
to undergo additional instruction or evaluation before they can be
chauffeured by robots.Self-driving cars promise a future where you can watch television,
sip cocktails, or snooze all the way home. But what happens when
something goes wrong? Today’s drivers have not been taught how to cope
with runaway acceleration, unexpected braking, or a car that wants to
steer into a wall.“Driver training or driver readiness is a component that we are actively discussing,” says Bernard Soriano,
deputy director for California’s Department of Motor Vehicles. “Some of
the elements that the manufacturers have in their test-driver training
programs could be something that we could consider.”These include classroom lessons on the abilities and limitations of
autonomous technologies, computer simulations of failures, and
real-world driving sessions. However, carmakers’ training programs can
vary considerably. (See our investigation of robocar test-driver certification here.)
Google requires that its test drivers complete weeks of in-depth
lessons and rigorous exams, while Audi’s entire program lasts just a
couple of hours.

One problem is that regulators do not know whether self-driving
technologies will arrive in production vehicles as optional features in
luxury cars or as the master control of fully autonomous robo-taxis. Ryan Calo,
who teaches a robotics law and policy class at the University of
Washington, believes the distinction is crucial. “For an autonomous
vehicle without a steering wheel, I’m not sure you need any more
training than you’d get for a dishwasher,” he says. “But for a vehicle
primarily meant to be driven by a human driver and that has an
autonomous mode, I could imagine some additional degree of
certification.”Today’s experimental autonomous cars occasionally need to hand
control back to their human operators, either because of a bug in the
system or for something as innocuous as the car leaving a well-mapped
area. These “disengagements” may require the driver to take action
quickly. California takes disengagements so seriously that it requires
manufacturers testing self-driving cars to log each one. “Today, drivers
are not trained or tested for that change in control,” says Patrick
Lin, director of the ethics and emerging sciences group at California
Polytechnic State University. “Humans aren’t hardwired to sit and
monitor a system for long periods of time and then quickly react
properly when an emergency happens.”Drivers might also need help setting up an autonomous vehicle,
training in how to deactivate systems in situations that no self-driving
car could anticipate, such as an approaching dust storm, or dealing
with errors made by the system as it is driving.

However, not everyone believes that self-driving technology presents drivers with any special challenges. In a document called The Pathway to Driverless Cars,”
[pdf] which was released 11 February, the British government said a
normal driver’s license would be sufficient to operate cars with an
autonomous mode in the United Kingdom, even for test drivers of
experimental vehicles. It also anticipates that fully automated vehicles
would require no driver’s license at all. But it acknowledges that
those views might change once self-driving cars take to the roads:
“Emergent properties of the way automated systems interact…may
potentially [require] changes to driver training, testing, and
licensing.”The Swedish authorities have a similarly flexible attitude. A report from the Swedish Transport Agency [pdf]
last year said, “As things stand at present, it is too early to
determine what authorization requirements would be appropriate” for
fully autonomous cars.

Soriano doesn't have the luxury of such a wait-and-see attitude.
California has already missed a 1 January deadline to establish
regulations for the public use of self-driving cars. When it comes to
the issue of driver training and certification, he admits, “We haven’t
made a decision on it yet.”

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About Me

I have more than 25 years of experience in development, design, and mobile communications products and technology. I also enjoy skiing, hiking, scuba, tennis, reading, traveling, foreign languages, and painting. I'm an active member of the National Ski Patrol (NSP) and volunteer my time at either Loveland Ski resort, or Ski Cooper.